NEW YORK, NY.- In the basement of an old museum, artist Nicole Eisenman grabbed a cordless hacksaw and started demolishing the past.

It was a scorching morning in June and Eisenman was excavating a mischievous mural sealed for decades behind a wall of the former Whitney Museum on Madison Avenue, where it had caused such a sensation at the 1995 Biennial. It was a panoramic, Boschian vision of the museum’s destruction, where everything from Edward Hopper paintings to Andy Warhol prints had been crushed, and the institution’s president left unconscious. Only Eisenman’s artwork, “Exploded Whitney,” was left standing at ground zero.

Now Eisenman was methodically reducing the chaotic mural to rubble, but there was another scene of destruction that most art historians have overlooked in the retelling of how Eisenman became one of the most important painters of Generation X. Splayed across the foot of the 30-foot-wide painting is a self-portrait of the artist dying, an allusion to Eisenman’s past struggles with heroin addiction.

Eisenman, who is 59, gender fluid and often uses they/them pronouns, kept these struggles with drugs a secret from the public for nearly three decades — most of their art career — but is now ready to reveal that they created the mural at one of their lowest points, during a sleepless week at the beginning of drug treatment. Look closely above and to the right: It’s a portrait of the doctor, Ann Bordwine Beeder, who the artist said provided lifesaving care.

Touching the mural for the first time in nearly 30 years, Eisenman recalled the day a Biennial curator visited their Brooklyn studio, where he surely would have seen drugs on a drawing desk. “Don’t know if he entirely trusted me,” Eisenman said, starting the hacksaw. “That might have been smart.”

The artist smirked before guiding the rotating blades down onto the mural like a guillotine. Demolition continued for several hours.

Pushing Back on Politics

Eisenman hopes that shattering personal history will spark creativity. Debris from the mural is being reconfigured into a new work, a sculpture, crowned by a portion of the painting that features another self-portrait of the artist, on a scaffold, continuing to draw on the last untouched wall of the exploded Whitney Museum.

“I look back and see that I was drawing myself in my world, which was breaking down,” Eisenman said during a coffee break at the demolition. “At the time, it just felt like a funny joke.”

Eisenman flinched with discomfort, admitting that an overwhelming sense of pressure had returned since they became a vocal supporter of Palestinian liberation and a cease-fire. That position put them at odds with some longtime collectors, who Eisenman said had urged the artist to remain silent about the Israel-Hamas war and threatened to sell off their paintings if they didn’t retract pro-Palestinian support. (One collector emailing Eisenman was Martin Eisenberg, an heir to the Bed Bath & Beyond fortune.)

“It is not anything that I will forget,” Eisenman said of “the feeling of being threatened by people who I had thought of as allies in the art world.”

The blowback came last fall, when Eisenman and hundreds of other artists signed a letter published in Artforum magazine that called for an immediate cease-fire but failed to initially condemn the Oct. 7 massacre of Israelis — a point that was later included in an update. (Under pressure from collectors and seeing what pain the letter had caused, Eisenman removed their signature but didn’t change their stance on the Palestinian territories.) The publication later fired its top editor, David Velasco, because of the letter. He was a close friend of Eisenman’s, so the artist responded by announcing that they would stop working with the prestigious magazine because it appeared to have censored political opinions.

“We are being judged as artists because of our politics,” Eisenman said. “If you are too far left or progressive, especially on issues of Palestine, then you are entering a politically dangerous place.”

So, Eisenman is doing what they do best: painting the world into a corner. Nearing 60 years old, the artist is experiencing a midcareer renaissance with an acclaimed retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (through Sept. 22); a current solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in Paris; and an upcoming commission, “Fixed Crane,” at Madison Square Park in New York City beginning Oct. 24 that will bring a decommissioned 1969 industrial crane crashing down, in Eisenman’s biggest sculpture work to date.

Money Buys Artworks, Not Artists

Art critic Barry Schwabsky has described Eisenman as “a painter of modern life,” borrowing a phrase from poet Charles Baudelaire to describe a once-in-a-generation talent.

The artist, who was born in France of German-Jewish descent, and lives in Brooklyn, is less precious, saying that after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1987, their early career was defined by “ribald, nasty, dirty, little drawings” that included a tuna fish admiring a woman’s scent and orgy participants distracted by video games. Eisenman, who identifies as queer, was pulling jokes from New York’s downtown lesbian scene of the 1990s while finding cultural influences everywhere, from newspaper comics to the 16th-century Dutch landscapes by Pieter Bruegel. The references were so arcane that Eisenman could renovate them into a contemporary style. Within a decade, Eisenman transformed the painterly tradition of allegories into “al-ugh-ories” that put a feminist twist on scenes inside beer gardens and bedrooms, and infused them with absurdist critique, burlesque eroticism and self-mockery.

In 2015, Eisenman won a “genius” fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation for “expanding the expressive potential of the figurative tradition in works that engage contemporary social issues and restore cultural significance to the representation of the human form.”

Eisenman’s career accelerated with a solo exhibition at the New Museum the next year and a celebrated turn toward sculpture, complete with a park fountain in Germany and another breakout hit at the 2019 Whitney Biennial called “Procession,” which included a seated figure flipped forward so he was capable of intermittently releasing misty farts into the air.

But while the sculpture was upstairs, earning praise for its audacity, Eisenman was downstairs raising hell with several other artists who boycotted the Whitney Museum. The artists marched alongside protesters calling for the institution’s vice chair, Warren B. Kanders, to resign because his company was involved in producing tear gas and other military supplies. When Kanders stepped down from his position two months later, Eisenman saw what was possible through activism.

Eisenman’s paintings have always included hot-button issues such as gender, sexuality, money and guns. But Eisenman described themself as more of an observer than a participant until the Black Lives Matter movement and, later, George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, which led to the artist’s mobilization.

Recent paintings bring those politics to eye level. “The Abolitionists in the Park” was quickly acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art after the painting’s completion in 2022. It captured the scene of an actual event: “Occupy City Hall,” an encampment at City Hall Park in 2020 in Manhattan, when protesters called for drastic cuts to the New York City Police Department’s budget. Under a darkened sky illuminated by a glowing orb ripped from Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” the painting includes more than 30 figures camping on blue tarps and chewing on pizza.

“Other painters are so psychological,” Eisenman said, when I asked about their approach. “Someone like Dana Schutz is fantastic because she is painting with her eyes closed,” Eisenman said of the artist known for gestural painting and distorted bodies. “Everything you see on the canvas is pure emotion, and you get to see what’s going on inside her head.”

The artist briefly paused and winked: “I paint with one eye open.”

One of Eisenman’s newest artworks distills their recent experience with the challenge of making political art. “Archangel (The Visitors),” which is currently on view at Hauser & Wirth in Paris, imagines a scene where Eisenman pickpockets a collector underneath the crushing gaze of a pigheaded soldier sculpture hanging from the ceiling. The sculpture featured in the painting refers to “Prussian Archangel” made by John Heartfield and Rudolf Schlichter for the 1920 International Dada Fair in Berlin, as a critique of German militarism. Eisenman’s painting is supposed to remind collectors that money buys artworks — not artists.

“I would say there are only a handful of collectors that I have sat down with and had dinner,” said Eisenman, explaining the difficult trapeze act of critiquing elites who may one day become patrons. “I don’t want to know them.”

But preserving the integrity of one’s artwork requires sacrifices.

For example, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s midcareer Eisenman survey, “What Happened,” will ultimately result in a financial loss for the institution because collectors that otherwise might have supported the exhibition opposed the artist’s statements about the Palestinian territories.

“It became clear they would not necessarily be the underwriters of the show,” said Madeleine Grynsztejn, the museum’s director. “It was financially a loss, but we did not in any way diminish the show as a result.”

Grynsztejn said there was a moral imperative to show nearly 100 of Eisenman’s artworks, which the museum intentionally displayed during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, to present a queer person’s perspective on the world, Grynsztejn said. The exhibition was ultimately able to attract other donors, including Vancouver, British Columbia-based art collector and real estate businessperson Bob Rennie, to help float the budget.

“I want to say that these are complex times to be both a private citizen and a public person,” Grynsztejn said during a toast at the exhibition’s opening in April. “Connection is what I see when I look at Nicole’s paintings. Their works propose new kinds of social arrangements. Generating that sense of connection is not spontaneous. It has been nurtured and sustained.”

Schwabsky, the art critic, said it was Eisenman’s outstanding skill and outspoken nature that insulated them from a career-defeating blowback to their politics. “A less-known artist might well be ‘canceled’ for taking those positions,” he said, adding that Eisenman was in a fortunate position that allows “a certain imperviousness.”

Birkenstocks and Nipple Rings

Before sending an industrial crane hurtling into the grounds of New York’s toniest park, Eisenman needed practice.

The artist headed upstate one early morning in August for a meeting with a structural engineer and officials from the nonprofit Madison Square Park Conservancy, who started planning the commission almost three years ago as the grand finale to the 20th anniversary celebration of its public art program.

“Forget the yawning divide between art and life,” said Brooke Kamin Rapaport, the park’s artistic director and chief curator. “Some people are going to see a toppled crane and think about the development and fall of industry. Some people are going to wonder why there is an extinct machine poised in the middle of this urban garden. And others are going to know the reference to Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades.”

Visitors will have the option of walking around the toppled crane’s 90-foot length or sitting atop its counterweight. Additional sculptural elements include a figure resembling a flag of surrender above the crane’s overturned cab, a purple nipple ring fixed to its boom, and a bronze, Birkenstock sandal-wearing foot tripping up the machine’s treads.

“I made this proposal not thinking for a second that it would happen,” Eisenman said, watching the sculpture being lifted into the air by men operating two cranes in a mechanic’s pas de deux.

As the strangely poetic scene played out above their heads, Eisenman contemplated what it meant to dissemble and reassemble the crane as sculpture. “To use space is to destroy space,” the artist concluded. “Destruction and construction are two sides of the same coin.”

That conversation returned Eisenman to thinking about the remnants of the Whitney Museum mural that were moved to the artist’s studio in Brooklyn. In time, the rubble will become a new sculpture, evoking a monument to that same destruction and reconstruction that has defined Eisenman’s turbulent life.

But at least the artist can laugh about those difficult times.

Back in the Whitney Museum basement with the broken remains of their famous mural, Eisenman showed me a satirical video that artist Ryan McNamara produced for the survey exhibition in Chicago. It is a comedic roast of the artist’s mural paintings, which ends on the “Exploded Whitney.”

McNamara pretends to be the newscaster who appears in the painting, at far right, surveying the damage at a museum he refers to as the “Blitney Fluseum of Slomerican Quart.” The camera pans across Eisenman’s magnum opus as McNamara appraises the destroyed masterpieces. “The Pollack? Pulverized. The Flavin? Flattened. The LeWitt? Leveled. Smithson? Smashed. Judd? Jammed. Stella? Stricken. Twombly? Twisted.”

“But somehow,” he said in the exaggerated New Yorky accent of a veteran reporter, “Eisenman, Nicole Eisenman, has come out unscathed.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.